Washington’s Blog/Global Research May 20, 2012 By George Washington Attack on the Press You know that the Department of Justice tapped scores of phone lines at the Associated Press. You might have
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Category Archives: police brutality

An Occupy Wall Street activist was acquitted of assaulting a police officer and other charges on Thursday after jurors were presented with video evidence that directly contradicted the NYPD’s story.

Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges this week in regards to a case that stems from a December 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan. For over a year, prosecutors working on behalf of the New York Police Department have insisted that Premo, a known artist and activist, tackled an NYPD officer during a protest and in doing so inflicted enough damage to break a bone.

During court proceedings this week, Premo’s attorney presented a video that showed officers charging into the defendant unprovoked. The Village Voice reports that jurors deliberated for several hours on Thursday and then elected to find Premo not guilty on all counts, which included a felony charge of assaulting an officer of the law.

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) – Police must face excessive-force claims related to an Occupy protest they dispersed at the University of California, Berkeley, a federal judge ruled.

The protesters claimed to have been engaged in a peaceful protest of tuition hikes and the privatization of public education when officers battered them and used excessive force.

After police raided their Sproul Hall encampment on Nov. 9, 2011, hundreds of protestors allegedly returned later that evening and erected more tents.

They said Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Harry LeGrande warned them to remove their tents before the police arrived 10 p.m., at which time they would allegedly give a 10-minute warning and remove the tents by force. Officers actually arrived in riot gear at 9:30 and raided the encampment, according to the complaint.

Protesters in the Occupy Los Angeles movement filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against the city and high-ranking officials alleging that the group’s constitutional rights were violated during its eviction.

The lawsuit alleges that the Los Angeles Police Department used “shock and awe” military tactics on November 2011 to forcibly remove hundreds of demonstrators who were encamped on the south lawn of City Hall. The group alleges that the police raid that resulted in nearly 300 arrests was “unconstitutional and an unlawful violation of plaintiffs’ First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to assembly, association, freedom from unlawful seizure and liberty.”

Bahrain’s top court confirmed the jail sentences of nine doctors for their role in last year’s pro-democracy protests, state news agency BNA reported. The medics will be imprisoned for up to five years.

­On Monday, Attorney General Abdul-Rahman al-Sayed said the country’s Court of Cassation rejected all of the defendants’ appeals and upheld the verdicts, BNA said.

The nine medics were among the twenty individuals tried by a Bahraini military tribunal in September 2011. The tribunal charged the doctors with felonies for their role in the February protests, which included treating antigovernment activists wounded by security forces and reporting those injuries to foreign media. Some of the medics also participated in the protests.

SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California has agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by demonstrators who were pepper-sprayed during an Occupy protest at UC Davis last fall, according to a preliminary settlement filed Wednesday.

The Nov. 18, 2011, incident prompted national outrage, angry campus protests and calls for the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after online videos shot by witnesses went viral.

Images of a police officer casually spraying orange pepper-spray in the faces of nonviolent protesters became a rallying symbol for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The demonstrators had been protesting steep tuition hikes and police brutality.

Under the proposed settlement, UC would pay $30,000 to each of 21 plaintiffs named in the complaint and an additional $250,000 for their attorneys to split.

A Houston police officer shot and killed a one-armed, one-legged man in a wheelchair Saturday inside a group home after police say the double amputee threatened the officer and aggressively waved a metal object that turned out to be a pen.

Police spokeswoman Jodi Silva said the man cornered the officer in his wheelchair and was making threats while trying to stab the officer with the pen. At the time, the officer did not know what the metal object was that the man was waving, Silva said.

She said the man came “within inches to a foot” of the officer and did not follow instructions to calm down and remain still.

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) — The University of California, Davis police officers who doused students and alumni with pepper spray during a campus protest last November won’t face criminal charges, prosecutors said Wednesday.

The chemical crackdown prompted widespread condemnation, campus protests and calls for the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after videos shot by witnesses were widely played online. Images of an officer casually spraying orange pepper-spray in the faces of nonviolent protesters became a rallying point for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

But the Yolo County District Attorney’s office said in a statement that there was insufficient evidence to prove the use of force was illegal.

A task force appointed by the university concluded in April that the Nov. 18 pepper-spraying was “objectively unreasonable” and could have been prevented.

The police crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street movement, since its beginning one- year ago today on Sept. 17, 2011, undermines core American values of freedom in the eyes of the world.

Particularly now, when extremist religious rhetoric is being used (and abused) to spark anti-American demonstrations around the world, this is an especially important time for the practice of respect for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, freedoms that are indispensable to the freedom of religion and the practice of democracy, to be on display in the United States.

Instead, what the world is seeing is photos of arrests of Occupy protesters as they attempt to take their message of Wall Street’s responsibility for the nation’s economic meltdown to the streets once again and call for policies that support economic equality and fairness.

Suppressing the message of Occupy Wall Street is wrong on many levels, both political and religious. It is anti-democratic, and also, in my view as a Christian pastor and teacher, in contradiction to the message at the center of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth of caring for the poor, and rejecting violence.

Demonstrators had planned to converge from several directions to form a “human wall” around the stock exchange to protest what they said was an unfair economic system that benefited the rich and corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.

Police officers and protesters squared off at various points, with protesters briefly blocking intersections and sidewalks before being dispersed and sometimes arrested.

The police appeared prepared to counter the protesters’ blockade with one of their own, ringing the streets and sidewalks leading to the exchange with metal barricades and asking for identification from workers seeking to gain access.

HONG KONG — Court officers and the police shut down the 306-day-old Occupy Hong Kong protest Tuesday in the street-level plaza under HSBC’s Asia headquarters, spending six hours in a sometimes disorderly confrontation that ended with the removal of the dozen protesters and the seizure of their tents and other possessions.

Representing the last vestiges of what was once a global movement, protesters screamed, shoved and in a few cases threw their bodies at police officers and court bailiffs.

Even as the bailiffs dismantled the last pieces of the encampment late in the afternoon, a protester with a megaphone vowed, ‘‘We’ll die before we leave!’’

Here, I will be shedding light on the real issues that we face everyday. Instead of taking sides, I will bring you information that will unite us rather than divide us. Our world today is full of opinionated idiots whose job is to only separate and confuse us. This has brought us to the brink. Media continues to reduce our world to talking points and mindless mantras. If we continue on this path we will be blindly led to our servitude. Let us come together and unite against those that wish to dumb us down and herd us like cattle to the slaughter. So today, I say, "Wake Up, Stand Up, and Be Heard!"